Analysis
Almost everyone involved in IT fears BYOD to some extent. That’s largely because they are terrified of careless colleagues costing the business a shed load of money.
But small to medium sized businesses who lack the budget and resources to do security well fear BYOD more than most. Just this week, Hugh Boyes from the Institution …

Despite all the furores, calamities and Snowden-related shenanigans of recent years, the UK’s privacy watchdog remains something of a pussycat, and a lean one at that.
Granted powers in April 2010 to fine firms £500,000 for breaches of the various laws it covers, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has flexed its mini- …

The growth rate of digital attacks continues to alarm. According to PwC’s Global State of Information Security Survey 2015, the number of reported incidents rose by 48 per cent this year to 42.8 million, the equivalent of 117,339 attacks a day.
Add to those the masses of unreported attacks and you have an awfully messy …

Despite its reticence over everything Snowden, GCHQ has been awfully proud of its work with academia over the last year.
Though it has always worked closely with universities, the Cheltenham-based spy agency has given its backing to various government initiatives designed to give a fillip to British cyber-security wannabes and …

Spam may be the best known security threat in the world. Anyone with email or a Facebook account has experienced it, despite providers’ best efforts to block it from their inboxes.
And although the world’s cyber warriors have taken down large chunks of infrastructure hosting massive spam campaigns, it remains a huge problem.
As …

Anyone following the fortunes of the world’s biggest technology companies will have noticed a trend: every one of them has gone potty for privacy.
This is not out of some sudden moral urge but because their futures depend on proving that they are good at protecting people’s personal data.
The Edward Snowden leaks, in particular …

A senior figure at the anti-virus giant McAfee once told this writer the security industry was a mess. There were too many vendors trying to do too many things. But what the industry mirrors is the threat landscape it is trying to calm down.
Just look at what’s happened in the past six months. Two of the most significant …

No doubt many of The Reg’s readers are tired of the term “the Internet of Things”. It is both a nebulous term and a vague idea. What it attempts to encapsulate is the masses of networks of automated machines that didn’t traditionally have connectivity, working to manage the environment around them, supposedly for the benefit of …

Brain. No, it’s not some Skynet AI drone, nor is it the blob that was always out to get the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles.
It is the name of the first PC virus, dating back to 1986. The two Pakistani brothers, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, who wrote it did not have malicious intentions: they simply wanted to scare people running …

Windows has been a beleaguered piece of software over the years. That is because malicious hackers, like everyone else, want to walk the simplest path to the greatest glory.
Microsoft’s operating system has been the most popular one for the past 20 years, so it has attracted the most malware. One IT professional told The …

Presagers of doom in the IT industry have sometimes got it horribly wrong. One need only look back 14 years to the millennium bug, which was supposed to bring down the world’s critical systems. The year 2000 came and went with no digital cataclysm in sight.
Even the smartest people make grand claims about imminent threats. …